HOUSTON - Federal investigators say their probe of a poisonous gas leak that killed four workers at a Houston-area chemical plant in November has found weaknesses and failures in the facility's safety planning and procedures.
Officials from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) said in an interim report released Wednesday that neither workers nor the public are protected against chemical exposure by equipment or safety procedures at the DuPont plant in LaPorte where the accident happened.
"DuPont has long been regarded as a safety leader in the chemical industry, but this investigation has uncovered weaknesses or failures in DuPont's safety planning and procedures," CSB Chairperson Vanessa Allen Sutherland said.
The report said an ongoing review of systems at the plant that control overpressure in equipment has "fallen far behind schedule."
Plant manager James O'Connor says the company is addressing the board's recommendations and cooperating with investigators.
The workers died after being exposed to methyl mercaptan, a raw material used to manufacture an insecticide. One of the workers made a distress call and two others died while responding. The CSB's report said the building where the workers died "was not equipped with an adequate toxic gas detection system" and that "two rooftop ventilation fans were not working, despite an 'urgent' work order written nearly a month earlier."
Investigators said that had the rooftop fans been working, they likely wouldn't have prevented the workers' deaths due to the high amounts of toxic gas released.
Company officials said the employees' tenures ranged from eight months to 40 years, and that all employees undergo "very extensive training—not only book training, but they must also demonstrate knowledge before you can work in a unit."
The La Porte incident is the worst loss of life in an industrial accident at the world's biggest petrochemical complex since 2005, when a refinery explosion killed 15 workers in Texas City. It's the third fatal accident the CSB has had to investigate in the past five years—others include a welder who died in 2014 when an explosion at a facility in Buffalo, N.Y., and another worker who died when a steel hose carrying phosgene gas burst in Belle, W.Va., in 2010.
